Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn

It's also idiotic because there are so many variations, and people can change. There are C players who have the talent to become B players in 6 months, and A players after 5 years, and B players worth having because of their other abilities (management potential, mentoring). There are also A players who will flame out, or become discouraged upon meeting the wrong challenge. Humanity does not divide so neatly.

In my experience the noise in a recruitment is generally a reflection of how well you write your ad and how clear you are in your mind about the kind of person you are looking for. Even in a downturn, I doubt anybody wants to waste their time applying for a job they are clearly not qualified for. Through the years I have learned to write much tighter job ads avoiding generic terms like "DBA" in favour of things like "Sybase administrator". At least that weeds out the people who don't know that Sybase is a database :-)

The class is CPSC 323, but it won't let me access it on the Yale server:

http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/

If you're really determined, you could email the teacher (see his homepage here: http://sce.cs.yale.edu/).

I think a better way to figure out your ability would be to do the problem described in this study and see how you measure up to the participants:

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpp_cacm1999....

You can see Peter Norvig's solution and commentary here:

http://norvig.com/java-lisp.html

I understand where you're coming from, but I think you have interpreted the author in a very different way to me. You say:

I actually haven't noticed that "rock star quality" makes people anything but jerks to work with

Nowhere does the author suggest that A Players are jerks to work with. In fact, had he had this assumption, he surely wouldn't have called them 'A Players'. It appears to me that you have correlated something that he said 'being very good at what you do' with another trait 'being a jerk to work with'. In my experience, this is not a strong correlation. Maybe in your experience it is, hence your interpretation. But the crux here is that your issue with his points hinges on your addition: A Player = jerk to work with.

As to serious loathing for people who divide the world into "C players", "B players" and "A players" I really do see where you're coming from - it does sound a little distastefully, doesn't it? Anything that apparently force-ranks human kind risks sounding distasteful I feel. But this isn't about classifying the person themselves (in their entire life), it's about classifying the person's ability to job the job that they are currently pursuing. This is hugely important. Someone might be a B Player in the world of software engineering, but an A Player on the soccer pitch.

Of course, this is all predicated on the ability to successfully classify potential employees as A, B, or C players.

A couple of months ago, I interviewed at a startup for a product management position. During the interview, it became clear that none of the interviewers had a clue about what product managers are supposed to do. It was almost as if somebody told them "You need a product manager!" (and it certainly seemed like they did), so they went out searching for one. I doubt that they would have been able to tell a good product manager from a smooth-talking bad one.

If you're trying to hire somebody for a position with which you have no expertise, I recommend bringing in an outside expert to advise you and screen candidates.

I agree. There's something very Aleksey Vayner about that blog post.